The Songmaster (19 page)

Andrew looked at his watch and spoke briskly. ‘We’d better head back. Mum will have afternoon tea ready.’

Ellen Frazer presided over an afternoon tea laid out like a magazine photo spread – lace doilies, a small vase of flowers, sponge cake and scones and a silver tea service. The tea was served on the verandah by Jilly, who moved slowly and deliberately – years of training and fear of dropping anything had made her cautious. But her smile was so friendly, her eyes so warm and her voice so sweet, Susan liked her immediately.

Later, as Susan stretched out on her bed under the fan, she decided this was a rather civilised way to live.

She fell soundly asleep and was woken by Andrew rubbing her shoulder. ‘Hey, sleepyhead. Cocktail time.’ He kissed her lightly on the tip of her nose. Not fully awake, Susan wound her arms about him, moving over on the bed to make room. It seemed a natural response, an indication of how comfortable she felt with him. He lay beside her, keeping his feet off the bed. ‘If I take my boots off, I won’t go anywhere.’ He nuzzled her throat and kissed her ear. Then sat up and smiled. ‘Lead me not into
temptation. We should head down the hall. Dad is due back any minute.’

Ellen handed round a tray of drinks and, as they settled on the verandah once more, a utility driven by an Aborigine pulled up and Ian Frazer got out, slapping his Akubra at the dust mixed with sweat on his checked shirt and jeans, and giving his dusty riding boots a kick on the ground. A leather notebook and glasses case were tucked into the top pocket of his shirt. It’s almost a uniform, thought Susan, but was quite taken by his imposing presence. Grey hairs poked around his open collar and his hands were calloused. His face had caught too much sun over the years. Susan could see traces of him in Andrew, the way he walked and held himself.

‘Welcome to Yandoo. Always nice to meet Andrew’s friends.’ He put his hat on a side table and kissed his wife as she handed him his drink. ‘So, what do you make of the great outback, Susan?’ asked Ian Frazer. ‘A new experience for you, I understand.’

Susan realised that her visit had been discussed by Andrew’s parents in some detail. It was not unexpected. The parents would naturally be interested in knowing as much as possible about any young female their elder son invited home. After all, this was an Australian dynasty and he was the heir. The possibility of matrimony must always be kept in mind, whatever the initial evidence
suggested. ‘Yes, it is, and a bit of an extraordinary experience at this stage. I was quite stunned by the desert coming up, I thought it would never end. But it’s nice to be here, at Yandoo. Nothing looks quite so . . . well, overwhelming now.’

‘I’m glad you’re feeling a little more comfortable,’ said Ian. ‘Y o u didn’t stay over in Darwin?’

‘No. Didn’t have time.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘I guess that sounds very much like city talk, doesn’t it? Time seems to have a new dimension out here. Everything seems to have new dimensions out here.’

‘I guess out here we have grown up with a different attitude to time,’ agreed Ian. ‘Been here a hundred years or so and we think in seasons rather than days and weeks. We don’t wear watches most of the time.’

‘Almost like an Aboriginal sense of time, then.’ The conversation stopped dead. Ian Frazer’s hand stilled as he went to top up his beer. ‘Now where did you pick up that idea, an Aboriginal sense of time?’

‘Beth Van Horton, a woman who works among Aborigines, told me a few things in Sydney. Partly to get me committed to coming up, I guess. She puts a lot of importance on time. In relation to this country and the Aborigines. After all, it’s been their land for what, at least 40,000 years. That’s a long time.’

‘We don’t see it as their land necessarily,’ he said with stress on ‘their’.

‘Surely we all understand that those old ideas of Aborigines not having any place, being nomads and not using the land or having any claim to it, have been thrown out,’ persisted Susan.

‘You’re talking about early settlement days. In my father’s day we took up this land and have title to it. Many settlers ran the blacks off their places, they killed stock and harassed the homesteads. There was killing on both sides,’ he conceded.

‘Spears against guns. Pretty uneven odds in the long run.’

Andrew shot Susan a glance. He didn’t look happy at the turn of the conversation. His father was determined to make Susan see his point.

‘I think my family acted with consideration. We chose to let them stay on the property. And they turned into pretty good workers. Great trackers and horsemen, too.’

‘I suppose many of the stations couldn’t have survived without the help of the local Aborigines,’ said Susan.

‘That’s exactly right. And let me tell you this, most of them became very loyal to their station family. Often more so than to their own people. There’re many instances of station blacks running down and capturing wild blacks in the neighbourhood who threatened stock or took over a waterhole.’

‘Maybe they’d never had reason to feel threatened by their own people before. As I
understand it, they had their own groups and land and didn’t fight over it. I’m sure the station blacks had no idea where their so-called loyalty would end up,’ said Susan, sending home her last barb. ‘So in a way the Aborigines unwittingly contributed to their own demise.’ Then seeing the scowl on Andrew’s father’s face, she added, ‘I’m just playing devil’s advocate. It’s my job.’

‘She’s a solicitor, Dad.’

Ian Frazer put his cup down and continued in a voice that didn’t agree or disagree with her points. ‘I see. If you’re interested in the history of Yandoo you might like to see the photographs in my study.’ He rose and Susan followed him off the verandah into a room filled with books, a gun rack, leather chairs, a desk, paintings and photographs. ‘There’s a photograph of my father taken back in the early days on Yandoo, and a painting of my grandfather.’ He pointed to two large oval-framed pictures on the wall.

Cunning old bugger, thought Susan, fully absorbing the message he intended she get. She walked over to the pictures and took a long look. They were formal studio portraits, the men stiffly posed, immaculately presented. But staring into the faces of these Australian pioneers she thought she could see the determination and strength that had held them in this place, and also the pride in what they had achieved. There was no hint of softness and she
wondered if their wives had longed for the gentle touch and sweet murmurings of lesser men.

She became aware Ian was standing behind her. ‘I prefer the informal photographs, this one of my father and his favourite horse especially.’ Susan turned and looked up into his deep blue eyes that were just like Andrew’s. ‘I guess my picture will go up there soon enough, and one day, Andrew’s too. It’s a Yandoo tradition. It’s all a matter of time.’

Time. A commodity that was daily rationed in her city life. Here it represented lineage and belonging. He was looking into her eyes almost confrontationally when Ellen Frazer broke the spell. ‘Enough of that talk, Ian, you’re getting into one of your deadly serious moods again. Susan, perhaps if you can stand up to it, Andrew might show you around a bit more. I’ll organise Jilly and dinner. You no doubt have some paper work to do, dear,’ she said pointedly to her husband.

Dinner was quite formal, served in the old-fashioned dining room, watched over by family portraits, several good if conservative paintings, photos of horses, bulls and the homestead in its early years. Old wood shone in the flattering light of candles placed in heirloom silver. Andrew had told her the family ate together in the dining room most evenings. The routine of a genteel lifestyle hadn’t altered in several generations,
Ellen Frazer presiding over the small talk and curbing any hint of dissension.

The next afternoon, on the drive about the immediate property, Andrew told her snippets of family history.

They passed the headstones of family members which dotted one side of a hill. Below it were casually arranged unmarked stones that Andrew explained were itinerant workers or Aborigines. ‘The station blacks won’t come near here, they reckon it’s haunted by trapped spirits or something.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘In the old days, the blacks used to dig up the remains of their own, but Grandad put a stop to that. He said they should have a decent Christian burial and go to meet their maker in a box with their boots on and not wrapped in grass and bark and left in a tree, or whatever the old men wanted to do.’

‘Would it have mattered? The bloke was dead, why not let them do their ceremonial thing?’

Andrew looked thoughtful. ‘I guess the family was trying to do the right thing. The blacks on Yandoo were regarded as part of the place, it was their home too, so they had to fit in with Yandoo’s ways. But listen, Susan, I don’t think you should challenge how we do things so much, when you’ve had no experience out here yet.’

‘Point taken,’ said Susan, easily. ‘So what’s the situation, now?’

Andrew went on. ‘The last fellow I remember dying here, a black fellow that is, wanted to be buried in the town cemetery with a stone with his name on it and have the priest say the right words. Dad said it was a bit of a hassle getting it done, but old Jacko lies in state in Katherine cemetery. I would imagine most of the Yandoo mob now just assume they’ll end up here on the underside of the hill.’

‘But if they wanted to have a traditional burial ceremony in their home country, they could?’

‘I suppose if they wanted to be taken back to their country by their people and they had access, that’s what they’d do.’ Andrew eased out the clutch and moved on. ‘Some of them are here because they can’t get to their traditional land, it’s inaccessible, their people have dispersed, or it’s on a pastoral lease.’

‘But you said Yandoo was their home. Is that because it once belonged to them, the land that is, or because your family just allow them to stay?

He smiled at her, shaking his head. ‘Susan, stop being a lawyer and just enjoy the scenery.’

They drove to machinery sheds and looked at tractors and generators, and on to stables to look at harnesses and saddles, to the stockyards where four Aboriginal ringers and the head stockman were branding cattle and clipping horns. They watched while the stock were
herded into a chute with a metal base, their weight registering in digital green on a battered calculator. The weights were carefully recorded in the head stockman’s notebook. Andrew boosted Susan up on the fence so she could watch the weighing process. As the head stockman finished noting the last numbers Andrew called out, ‘Earl, this is my friend, Susan. This is Earl, our head stockman.’

The wiry Aborigine gave a quick nod and a grin. ‘Pleased-t-meet-ya’ came out as one word and he turned back to where a young jackaroo was jabbing the next bull with an electric prodder to hasten it into the chute. After weighing, the jackaroo slammed down a handle, which lifted the heavy metal slide that closed off the chute, and the animal was released into a holding yard.

‘They’re so big,’ exclaimed Susan. ‘So powerful.’

‘What are they running at, Earl?’

‘Round the five-fifty boss.’

‘That’s five hundred and fifty kilos. They’ll lose a bit of that before they get to auction.’

‘It looks like dangerous work.’

‘Not while they’re in the yard. Mustering them in the scrub is the challenge. We sometimes use the chopper but mostly horses and motorbikes. Strike a rogue bull out there and you have to watch out.’ He held up his arms and lifted her down from the top railing. ‘There’s more to Yandoo, come on. See ya, Earl.’

The stockman waved his arm but didn’t take his eyes off the electronic calculator.

They crossed low hills in the four-wheel drive to see views that gave Susan a greater appreciation of the vastness of the Frazer property. It was so much larger when you stared at its limitless horizons compared with the view from the plane. She was conscious of a sense of infinity, that Yandoo just went on for ever and ever, an incalculable distance beyond the horizons. It seemed to Susan that Andrew knew intimately every corner of his beloved country.

‘You love it, don’t you?’ she said softly and took his hand as they stood beside the vehicle on one hill watching the colours soften and shadows lengthen as the sun sank.

He didn’t speak but looked slowly around the country sprawling below him. ‘Yes, I do love it. Ever since I was a kid and started exploring the place with Hunter. He’d learned to track, so we never got lost. Even though we were just youngsters, I knew I was safe with him.’ He fell silent.

‘What do you suppose happened to him?’

‘I dunno. I think about him occasionally. Hope things worked out for him. I always felt bad about him. It was hard coming back from boarding school and finding that he’d just . . . gone.’ He paused again then pointed to a clump of trees near a windmill. ‘See that pump, those trees?’

‘Yes.’

‘It was one of my first camps out with Dad when I was a boy. My first camp with only stockmen. I was seven or eight at the time. There have been a few thousand campfires since then. Great learning experiences. Sometimes I reckon I learned more around those fires than I ever did at school,’ he grinned.

‘What sort of things?’

‘Oh, all about horses, cattle, women . . .’ he laughed. ‘My brother and I used to call it bush school . . . it was the best.’

At dinner that night, as Ian Frazer helped himself to several potatoes, he turned to Susan. ‘Andrew says you’re headed out into the Kimberley desert. Camping with some tribal people?’ He sounded bemused.